Learning from technology.
It Is all About Communication and Interaction.

December 3, 2011

My impression about Second Life

So far, I’ve
been involved in Second Life for about 1 month.
I was so excited at the beginning of the game even though I totally didn’t
have an idea what I should do with it. Although it is not the first online game
I have played, it’s quite different from others. Second life is a well-designed and user
friendly game. In this virtual reality, people are able to build their own
avatar, setting and changing the appearance and outfit according to their preferences.
Avatars can walk, run, sit, fly in the virtual world and talk to each other
with typing or through voice.

Although
Second Lift is often considered a game, I didn’t see the common
characteristics of a game within it, such as game points, plot points, winner,
loser, levels, tasks or final strategy. So I couldn’t do anything more except
walking around some island at the beginning. After initial novelty faded, I felt kinda
bored. I think nobody would enjoy doing anything without a clear goal.

My view
began to change when I met some people in Second Life. One of them was a professor
who teaches Biology in a university. Interestingly, it seems veterans are
always willing to take care of novices in any game, even if they don’t know
each other. And I am lucky enough to meet an educator who uses Second Life in
his classroom. He showed me around his
island and explained to me how he used this 3D-dimentional world to interact
with his students and his colleagues. How students complete their assignment and
what materials he used to enrich the course content. It’s really an impressive
and enjoyable tour with a tourist guide who is nice and patient. When I asked
him whether there were many professors in his university used second life, he
told me just a few. He spent a couple of weeks on building his island but more
than one year on learning how to do so. It surprised me a lot. I think many teachers would rethink about
whether it’s worth doing if a course planning is so time-consuming. It’s fact
that to teachers, effectiveness and efficiency is the major factors for them to
choose a teaching tool.

Laboratory: where student use microscope to watch slices and use tools do various experiments.

Virtual Cell: it's easy for students to understand composition of a cell and how moleculars work.

In the
following weeks’ activities, I had more chance to explore SL by myself.
Actually, I invited one of my friends to join my tour. Through achieving the
goal of each section, we were both amazed about people’s creativity. After
gaming, I searched information about Second Life by Chinese search engine. It
showed that educators in China had already used SL to assist their teaching. It
was what I hadn’t expected. Because most social networking services in China
were designed for entertainment. According to the report, SL is often used in
teaching subjects such as linguistics, astronomy, medicine, business,
literature, are and design, biology, history, ecology and tourism. The common
feature of these subjects is that they all require students’ practice or real-life
experience to achieve a good learning outcome. SL’s virtual reality environment
and innovative tools enable teachers and students to develop various activities
that help students understand the connection between theory and practice,
facilitating the application of their new skills and knowledge in the classroom
as well.

The
experience in SL is really eye-opening to me. But it still has some problems
when integrate into education. I will continue my tour in SL and make clear how
much I can do and what difficulties I will encounter when designing an online
learning environment with SL.

Min

About Me

Hey,this is Min here. You can call me Tina if you'd like. I like traveling, CG, photography and all strange things happend in the world every day.
Welcome to my place and enjoy you time here. I'd love to share all my favorites with you~